Search

Last week I mentioned the discovery of a newspaper report of the funeral of my 3x great-grandfather, Henry HEMSLEY at Framfield, Sussex on the 15th January 1914. The amount of information contained in the report was quite remarkable.

One of the most valuable features was the list of chief mourners at the funeral, which appears to be an almost complete list of Henry’s descendants. Not only does it give the names of the mourners, but it also gives their relationship to Henry.

I am sure don’t need to point out what a valuable piece of information this is. I now have a list of the children that had married, or those who hadn’t (or whose spouse had died). Going one step further than that I can also see many of Henry’s grandchildren as well.

It is going to take a while to go through this list and confirm the details and enter them into my family tree. Some of the information I already have, some will confirm what I previously suspected and some is completely new to me.

The amount of information contained in this report is really quite staggering and it makes me wonder just how the newspaper reporter went about collecting all this information?